Aurelio Medel | This week’s fatal train accident is a tragic metaphor for this government. The first step is to blur facts with narratives—something in which Pedro Sánchez is a master and Óscar Puente his finest apostle; the second is to shift the blame onto others. That is the general pattern in a country, called Spain, which boasts the best macroeconomic figures in the European Union but cannot withstand the…
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Yesterday, in line with expectations, the ECB kept key interest rates unchanged, with the deposit facility rate at 2.5% following the June and September hikes. Furthermore, the statement noted that the scale and duration of the energy shock (crude oil, and especially gas and distillates), along with its indirect and second-round effects (which are currently not evident, given stable wage growth), will likely push inflation higher and weigh on economic…
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party and acting President of Brazil, re-elected his presidency yesterday, October 25, after securing more than 64.2 million votes in the second round of the presidential election—51.8% of the votes cast—compared to the 59.8 million votes obtained by his opponent, the leader of the Liberal Party, Flávio Nantes Bolsonaro. Polls pointed to a very tight result and almost a technical tie….
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Rosa Mª García Piñeiro, board member at Caixabank, Acerinox, and Ence—serving as chair of the sustainability committee for the latter two and as a committee member at Caixabank—explains that “the directive does not set the materiality threshold. The company decides it based on its own criteria. There is nothing in the legislation that prescribes what is material and what is not. The auditor-verifier may have one opinion, the company may…
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Says Antonio Bonet, president of the Club of Spanish Exporters and Investors. He points out that “Europe has a single tariff applied by all member states, but the U.S. applies a tariff to each country, meaning it can decide that the tariff applied to Spanish black olives is higher than that for Italian olives, as it did at one point. So there is a part of the negotiation between Europe…
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